#275 Christian Espinosa: The Adrenaline of Risk and Cybersecurity Entrepreneurship

0:00:02 - Mehmet
Hello and welcome back to a new episode of the CTO show with Mehmet. Today I'm very pleased to have with me Christian Espinosa, joining me from Arizona in the US. Christian, thank you very much for being with me on the show today. The way I love to do it is I ask my guests to introduce themselves, because I believe no one else can do an introduction for someone better than themselves. So the floor is yours. 

0:00:27 - Christian
Alright. Well, thanks for having me on, mehmet, I appreciate it. So I'm Christian Espinosa. I like risk in adventure. I've done about 300 skydives. I like anything that involves a waiver. Where you have to sign a waiver that means you can possibly lose your arm or die. I'm sort of attracted to risky activities. The 24 Ironman triathlons and maybe the fact that I'm attracted to risky activities has made me want to become an entrepreneur. So I've been an entrepreneur for about 15 years. 

I was a solopreneur for a while. I used to be in the Air Force, the US military, for a while, and I built and sold one cybersecurity company. And I have a new cybersecurity company now called Blue Goat Cyber. I figured with this company, this new company, blue Goat Cyber, I can avoid a lot of dumb tax. So I like to say that I paid my first company. I currently live in Arizona. 

I travel around quite a bit. I was just in Dubai last week in an Abu Dhabi a little bit before that, for the Formula 1 race. I like Formula 1. I like world travel. I've been in about 70 countries. I've written two books. My second book was just published today, actually, and my first book was really about my entrepreneurial journey. It's called the smartest person in the room. It's about my journey with my first cybersecurity company, because one of the things I realized in my company was most of the problems I had in the company were not because my staff lacked technical skills. It was really because they lacked people skills or emotional intelligence. So I worked to train my staff and add that EQ skills to already high IQ individuals in my company, and that's what I wrote about in my first book. 

0:02:19 - Mehmet
That's great. Thank you again, christian, for being with me today. Maybe first question that came to my mind and you are in risk, so maybe I can relate but why you choose, as an entrepreneur, to take the path of cybersecurity and knowing that, christian, it's not an easy one. It's something with a lot of up and downs and it needs a lot of dedication. What attracted you to be in that domain? 

0:02:53 - Christian
When I got out of the US military I wanted to have options for my career, for my commercial career, and in the military I did information assurance or cybersecurity. It was a little bit different back then, but I saw a progression that cybersecurity was going to become more and more and more in demand. So I focused on getting cybersecurity certifications. My first job was doing security. When I got into the military I just kind of built my career around that I realized from an entrepreneur perspective. 

Sometimes I think maybe I should do a different business where it's not quite as challenging, because the bottom line in cybersecurity is most people don't care about cybersecurity unless there's a compliance driver, some sort of regulation like in the US we have HIPAA, the FDA or some driver that makes somebody have to do cybersecurity. 

That's one reason. The other reason is that they already had a date of reach. So it's kind of a hard thing to sell because people don't really want it unless they're required to have it or they've learned their lesson a little bit with a date of reach. So it is a challenging industry but I feel like with this company now, like I mentioned before in the intro, I can fast forward it because I paid a lot of that dumb tax with my first company, my first company. When I started it I didn't know anything about sales, I didn't know anything about marketing. I just thought I'll build a company and clients will come, kind of like that movie Feel the Dreams. But that doesn't happen. You have to create a funnel and get people to understand your brand and network and do a lot of things to keep the sales coming in. 

0:04:40 - Mehmet
Yeah, funny enough, when I talk to Seizos and I ask them of course, because I can ask from, I would say, a neutral perspective or someone who's not going and trying to sell them necessarily a product and they always tell me when someone from a cybersecurity company calls us, as you said, it's like the insurance guy who's phoning you. You know that you need it but actually you don't want to do it. So pretty much it's very, very common, I think, across the board. Now you mentioned Christian about a couple of things that forces usually companies to buy cybersecurity products, and you've been like in this for a long time and you had your previous company and the current company, but of course there will be. You mentioned two drivers One is compliance and one is data breaches. 

In your opinion, like when you know, as a decision maker in a company, right, and I'm saying as from a client perspective, what do you think are the priorities that really drives me as a Seizo or even CIO, to go to my board and say guys, if we don't do this, you know, this is the risk, this is what we got, what can happen and the reason I'm asking you because I hear a lot, you know and I see a lot of articles that their biggest struggle is because they need to spend money on something not tangible. So, from your experience, how these leaders can take this message and convert it to some terms that the board would be able to understand. 

0:06:27 - Christian
That's one of the biggest challenges. I think you mentioned insurance. Cyber security is kind of like insurance you don't realize you need it until you need it, but it's good to have it. So one of the challenges we have with CISOs and technical leaders is they often were promoted from a technical background and they don't understand how to communicate in terms of the business objectives, in terms of strategy for the business, in terms of risk reduction, so it often sounds like technical jargon. 

I think if I'm on the board or I'm the CEO and someone's explained to me a bunch of technical jargon that I don't understand, it doesn't tie into how it's going to help the business, then I'm probably not going to want to do it. I think it's important that CISOs have great communication skills and they can talk and posture cybersecurity in terms of aligning with the business objectives and maturing it. Aligned with the business objectives, it is not necessarily a tangible thing, but if you don't do it, the results can be tangible and devastating. Over 60 percent of small businesses that have a data breach go out of business. For me, as an entrepreneur, I know how hard it is to build a business and I would hate for someone's small business to go out of business because of a data breach. So if you have a little bit of the statistics and the background and you can communicate better, I think a CISO would be better positioned to help the company with cybersecurity. 

0:08:08 - Mehmet
Yeah, that's great To your point actually, chris, especially for and this is I repeated on the show multiple times because unfortunately people think that the bad actors goes after the big names, the big enterprise only, but it's not the case. 

I tell them guys already, as an entrepreneur, the moment your startup is born, it's percentage of staying alive after one year is 10 percent. So this, based on statistics like startups that can survive more than one year, just is like 10 percent. It's becoming more hard and hard. Don't let something, an event, a cybersecurity event, even shrink the 10 percent to maybe like 0.001 percent, because, especially if you're writing code, you have your IP in place, you have whatever, if you are inventing something, maybe you have patent or whatever, so you need still to protect it, doesn't matter how big or small you are. So this is 100 percent. I agree with you on this point. Now I would love to, if you can elaborate and you wrote about it, the first book, about the seven step secure methodology If you can explain to me and to the audience and how it transformed technical leaders into more effective communicators and leaders. Actually. 

0:09:33 - Christian
The seven steps I wrote about in the smartest person in the room were really the things that worked in my company and it's a framework or a methodology to help somebody progress with people skills. But, like, step one is awareness. I think we all need to have awareness before we can change anything. I'm not a believer that knowledge is power. I think awareness or knowledge doesn't matter unless you can do something with it. And in the book I use a lot of neuro linguistic programming or NLP concepts. So, and one of them is that our brains have neuro plasticity. 

We can change our behavior and, from an awareness perspective, we were very programmatic. We like to think we're unpredictable, but humans are very programmatic. It's like a program that runs. So there's a trigger and we run this program and automatically, before we know it, the program is over and we didn't even realize what we just did. So from an awareness perspective, if that behavior or that program is not serving you, it's important to be able to do a control C or stop that program and then run a different program and the new program will become the default behavior over time. And that's something a lot of people they don't understand. They just think that they're very unpredictable and they can't change things. So that's step one. 

Step two is mindset. There's really two types of mindset, and I got this concept a little bit from Carol Dweck's book. There's a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. We want to have a growth mindset, which means we believe we can change. If we have a fixed mindset, we believe our brain is hardwired and we're just the way we are. In my industry a lot of people will say I'm just not good with people. That's the example of a fixed mindset and I usually ask people well, what would happen if you got better interacting with people? And they think about it and they say, well, my life would probably improve and if they can take those steps, that would be a growth mindset. 

And then step three is acknowledgement. One of the things I realized as a leader and it took me a while to realize this is I had a hard time acknowledging myself for accomplishing anything or doing hard things. I remember in 2005, I stood under the Ironman World Championship finish line. I was just withered a watch to race and I told myself I would do the race one day. And then, 10 years later, I did it. And I remember crossing the finish line. I never once took a second to pat myself on the back or acknowledged that I did something that took me 10 years. I was automatically thinking about the next thing and I realized, if I had this problem myself, that it's going to show up in my interactions with my staff or my team. So that's something I worked on quite a bit as well, because everybody wants to be. They want to feel appreciated and understood and acknowledged. 

This step four is communication, which we talked about a little bit with the SISOs and trying to get a budget and cybersecurity. This is a massive problem in my industry. I think it's a massive problem in society anyway. But I'm a proponent that the meaning of communication is the response you get. So if you're communicating with someone and you're not getting the budget, you're not getting, they're not understanding, they're not taking the action you want to take, the ownership shifts to you to alter how you communicate. Typically, what we do is we blame the other person rather than alter how we communicate, and I'm a big proponent of taking ownership of that communication. 

So step five is mono-tasking. So mono-tasking is the opposite of multitasking. We've been kind of brainwashed today to multitask, which when we multitask we're very busy but not very productive. We're also very stressed out because we're always waiting to respond to something and every time we switch from one task to another one, that context switching causes us to sometimes mix up the tasks we're doing and lose efficiency. So mono-tasking helps with Productivity and it also helps with communication, because if you're monotasking, when you're Communicating with someone, you're being present. That means you're not thinking about anything else, you're not checking your phone, you're present, which makes you a better communicator as well. 

And then step six is empathy. In our society today there's a lot of division. There's, you know, the pro-vacciners, the anti-vacciners, the Democrats or Republicans. You know there's all this division and it's hard to be empathetic when we only see division. And we all have the human condition in common. And if we step back and realize that the person we're communicating with or interacting with Probably has a lot of the similar struggles as we do, it's much easier to be empathetic. 

And this is something that I had last year in February, I developed blood clots in my left leg and had to go to the hospital and the doctor came out Finally and told me I had six blood clots in my left leg and I asked him what it meant and he said I could. He said I meant I could die or like have a stroke at any moment. So it's kind of freaked out Is there by myself. And it's interesting because what he said is he said, oh, don't worry, I see this all the time and and I was like you know, I was like silently crying there and I was like thinking about die and I I said, well, I don't, this is a, this is a first for me. So I think from empathy perspective, he saw himself as the, the doctor, me as the patient. Again, that divide Versus I'm just a fellow human being going through something pretty difficult here. Maybe he could show some empathy. I think he was trying to show empathy, it just didn't come across away. 

And then the last, last step is Kai's in. Kai's in is a Japanese word that means Constant and never ending improvement, or can I? The whole concept is any of these steps you're working on or anything in life. You need to have the courage to take the first step. But if you adopt the philosophy of Kai's in, that means as long as you're making improvements, that's what matters. We're not going to master something overnight. A lot of people will start a new Program or new fitness routine or try to improve in the relationship, and they'll go go after it for like a month. But if it doesn't work out, they just go back to the way things were, without realizing that this is a journey and mastery Takes time and you know, we never really master anything. I mean, I'm still gonna be working on things until, pretty much, you know, I die. So it's like this constant Search for improvement, really, when those are the seven steps from high, very high level, of course. 

0:16:48 - Mehmet
Amazing Christian and actually a lot, actually all of them. They resonated to me because but you know the point that, or the step that resonated with me, is maybe the last one. We're living in a time also, where people want to All of a sudden become one of these no names, right so, and unfortunately it's, you know, like it's. It's being Irritating, honestly, like if I want to be like little bit polite to not say anything when, where you know we are seeing this culture of people, hey, like, do this and you become that. It's not like this, it's like it needs to spend time. It takes a lot of time, but to your point and this is something you know, I learned it the hard way also as well. So, because you know, when I was younger, you know I want to do things fast and I want to, and I want to do progress in a much faster way, until I start to read these books and you know a lot of books that cover the kaizen and you know similar People who talks about similar concept that, okay, guess what? 

You just need to do small steps, and you know these small steps will, will become like, after a couple of weeks, months, years, those big steps that you wanted to take. So you need to give yourself the time you know to reach there. And this applies the nice thing about that it applies to many things in life, including careers, including, you know, leadership, including everything. So, really, these seven steps, christian, I think they are a cornerstone, not for only technology people or cybersecurity people. I think it applies across the board, right. 

0:18:33 - Christian
Yeah, I mean, my book is really probably a personal development book Framed in the context of my career with cybersecurity. If we had to, like, distill it down to to what is, yeah, yeah, 100%. 

0:18:48 - Mehmet
Now, you know I don't want to spend much on cybersecurity, honestly, but again, you know, because this is we talk about every day. So you know, I Want to hear your opinion as an entrepreneur as well, and because you mentioned something very it's, it's, it's a lesson that everyone should learn from, because you mentioned about your first start up and you know there was not like sales funnel and so on now. But there is, I think, a thin line, christian, between Exaggerating things in term of what a solution can do and being you know, also, at the same time, showing the empathy that you talked about just few minutes ago with the customer I took with a lot of people you know, and from both sides, from vendors perspective, from clients perspective. We see this happening all the time. Of course we know, like, for example, ransomware Is the biggest threat that everyone talks about today and, of course, data breaches. 

Now Leaders in in in client side, like CISO, cios, they're telling me and actually they are telling everyone. We are not liking the way when these vendors, they come to us right after you know a major Event happens and they try to pitch their solutions right. So how critical it is also to show the empathy as as a provider to the customers, especially when, when we have, you know, on average, I think, every the last time I checked, I'm not sure if it changed like I think, we have a cybersecurity Event every 11, every 11 seconds or so. So what? What are your thoughts about that? 

0:20:35 - Christian
I Think it's extremely important to show that empathy. As I mentioned with my first cybersecurity company that I Added the EQ skills I wrote about in the book, the people skills I that helped us with with communicating with the clients, because if you put yourself and this is empathy as well you put yourself in somebody else's shoes or you understand their perspective or try to understand it. It it changes your lens of how you view the scenario and I think, from a client perspective, if they've had a data breach or even they're trying to make a purchasing decision for cybersecurity, it's important to put yourself in their shoes, and one of the things that I I learned when I sold my company I sold it to a, my first company. I sold it to a publicly traded company. The culture is very different in the. The company that bought mine and One of the the staff on that company that helped respond to incidents like ransomware didn't have a lot of people skills and he would Frustrate the clients so much because he didn't understand their perspective. He didn't even try to understand. He had frustrated the client so much that they didn't want to work with us and it's ironic that that was the exact thing I tried to solve. I did solve in my company, but then the company I sold mine to have you know a few challenges around that topic. 

So I think, from a communication perspective, from a sales perspective, it's important to put yourself in the client's shoes, even like for me, what I do. I do sales quite a bit as I look at who the Person is we're interacting with and from their perspective. They're probably talking to multiple vendors and they work for the CEO typically or they work for some other person high up in the company. They've been put in charge this task of making a purchasing decision, so they want to make sure they're making the right decision and it's going to be a great experience, it's the right price and they want to make sure that they recommend us to their boss, that it is the right choice. So I always put myself in their shoes because I I think a lot of us only look at the world through our own perspective and that's why I said empathy is seems to be a problem today, when we have all this division and we think they're a client, I'm a vendor, we're trying to sell some of them. We need to just look at ourselves in a similar fashion. 

0:23:06 - Mehmet
And here is the key, and I think, the ones who making the situations a win-win for everyone who comes, as I know like it's also a cliche, unfortunately, but really, when you go there as a trusted advisor and you know I work myself as a sales engineer and I know you know how the customer will appreciate when you try to not only solve the problem that your solution can offer to them but try also to shed some less on other things that maybe they are not seeing today. So this is what can tweak the whole conversation and they stop to see you as someone who is after their money, because, yeah, then you know everything has to end with a transaction, business transaction. This is normal. But you know, like the customer, they, from their perspective, they want to, you know, see the value as well and they need to see that you are not there just for taking the money and run away. So they want to see someone who would be standing with them. And you know, this is again to the seven steps that you just mentioned the empathy, the communication. 

I think all these together they can have. As you said, we are not two sides. Actually we are one team trying to solve problem together. I like this approach Now because you've done the entrepreneurship journey also as well, christian. So how did you balance? You know risk taking and I know that you love risks a lot with but at the same time, whereas you know the traditional things like strategic planning, you know having proper forecast to the business how it would be, especially and we know that cybersecurity can be sometimes be a very volatile feed right, so it can have its own up and down. 

So how did you manage to do this balance? 

0:25:07 - Christian
I think when I first started I didn't have a lot of balance. I have a Tennessee to just jump into something and try to figure it out, and that worked for a while in my company. But at some point, when you get to a certain size, you've got to systematize things a lot more. It's hard to scale when you're just trying to always figure things out. So I think one of the things that helped me the most in my company the one I sold was I did this thing called the one-page strategic plan. So you basically get your core values, the sandbox you want to play in, what your discriminators are, what your targets are all on one page. And going to the exercise to my leadership team really helped us narrow our focus and become more strategic. Because before what I did which was a mistake is I thought everybody needs cybersecurity, so I'm going to try to sell to everybody. But when you sell to everybody, your messaging is watered down. You don't really resonate with anybody. So after I did that one-page strategic plan, I realized the sandbox, as they call it. 

The area I wanted to play in was medical device cybersecurity. That's what we were going to focus on. Not a lot of people were specialized in medical device cybersecurity, so we focused on that area, which is more of a blue ocean strategy, as they say. There wasn't a lot of competition and once we narrowed it down to one specific niche it only targeted that ourselves went up. 

So it's kind of counterintuitive because a lot of, I think, entrepreneurs at the very beginning try to sell to everybody versus and they're afraid that if I narrow it down to this specific target that I'm going to lose all this other opportunity out there. But the reality is, if you narrow it down, niche it down, your messaging is going to be much more clear, you're going to understand the pain points of that specific target and your cells are going to go up. And then once you kind of master that one area, then you can add another niche. And that took me a long time to figure out. And now in this company, blue Goat Cyber, my new company we're again focused on medical device cybersecurity and a couple other things. But that is our main niche and that's our main area of expertise. And again, that's like the blue ocean strategy I mentioned. 

0:27:45 - Mehmet
I love that, everything related to blue ocean. I'm a fan of that because the question I ask always when someone tries to approach me whether they're trying to get me on board with them, or they ask me okay, can you promote our products, or so on I ask them this question what's your blue ocean? And then a lot of people I'm surprised that they don't understand this. They said what do you mean? I said because, look, if you're going to go and say the same messaging that a lot of people or they are in the same, not only the messaging, I mean the solution that you're trying to solve a problem, if a lot of people are in the same field and maybe you have like only one or two differentiators, probably no one will listen to you because they'll tell you hey, we have that solution today, why should change? So I love always and I like the way you niche down you said the medical devices, right, so I'm sure that there's not a lot of players in that area which is that you can take it to the other one and to the other I would say vertical, whatever that might be and then you grow it. So maybe back to the thing that you mentioned at the beginning, christian is to do the things in small steps and because you cannot become, let's say I don't want to mention a security vendor name, but one of the biggest security vendors, you cannot become like this in one year, like it might take with you 10 years until you're there. So this is where the vision, I believe, is very, very important. 

Now I want to come to your recent book that, of course, by the time this will be out, I think it's next week so today, 12th of December, is the date where we recorded this episode. So, if you can walk me through because the title is very attractive actually, so walk me through why you called it this way. The smartest person in the room and in the between. So I know that you came to some of the things you mentioned about the personal, I would say, characteristics, but can you elaborate a little bit more and what exactly the message you want to convey with the book? 

0:30:08 - Christian
This is with my new book, yes, okay. So my new book, the In-Between Life in the Micro that's the title is sort of a focus memoir on my life and where I feel like I've done things right and where I've messed them up, but it's focused on what I call the in-between. So often we get very focused on some macro goals, some big target out there, and we get so focused on it especially if you're an entrepreneur or a high achiever that we lose sight of all the things between where we are and that goal. And those things, which are the micro moments I call, can actually inform us that maybe this goal we're going after is not the right goal. They may be able to help us get to that goal faster, but again, they are things that can enhance our lives and add fulfillment. 

And in the book I write about the times that I've been focused on something you know macro, some big goal that I've ignored. 

Like you know, someone right in front of me, in a relationship, for instance, and then that relationship didn't work out and it's because I was. I lost sight of what was important. You know, I got so obsessed with the big thing I was trying to accomplish and there's been times I've done things right as well. So it's really my transformation of living life with some more intention on the small moments, the micro moments that I call them, and trying to keep hold the vision and not the circumstance. So an example I give in the book is even if I'm like going to dinner with my girlfriend, if you set the intention before you go to dinner that we're going to have a great time and it's a chance for us to connect, then the little things that happen, like if the waitress or the waiter messes up your order or there's a line or somebody spills something, they're not going to just derail you. So it's setting some intentions as well. So we have the ability to influence those small micro moments in a more positive manner as well. 

0:32:31 - Mehmet
Yeah, that's great. I'm sorry, I mixed the things up. I'm sorry for that Fishe. You were about to book before and this book, yeah, so it's in between. That's okay, yeah, yeah, that's fine. So, because I thought that this is the latest one, but it's okay, like you just mentioned it Now, when you look at your career and experiences, christian, what the impact that you hope you would be leaving to the world, both as leader in cybersecurity and as a human being. 

0:33:08 - Christian
Well, I think about this quite a bit because I'm doing my second cybersecurity company. I also write books and I do speaking, and one of the things I realized that I kind of infused in everything I do is I think people they know internally, they have this innate knowing of what they want to do or what they're capable of, but something happens in their life where they lose sight of that. So I want to help people uncover that and realize that they're capable of much more than they think they are. A lot of people kind of settle to a life of surviving versus thriving. So I want to help people uncover whatever is blocking them and then also help them develop the courage to take a new step and it could be in a completely different direction. 

But we only have one life and I think about death quite a bit and I always think if I died today or tomorrow, would I feel like I've done the best I could do in my life here and I can say yes, but I think if you ask a lot of people a lot of questions, they're going to have regrets because they didn't take this risk, they didn't do that, they didn't do this, and I've read a lot of books of people like on their deathbed, and a lot of people have a lot of those regrets. So I'm hoping to, through my books, my leadership style, my talks, help people develop that courage to take the first step, take a different path, and a path that they know is for them. So I think if we tune into ourselves, we all have a calling, if we actually listen. And I think a lot of us have learned to tune out that calling. So that's what I feel my purpose is. 

0:35:06 - Mehmet
That's amazing Christian, and just not a confession, but this is something I mentioned also multiple times. So I was late to take these actions, but, nevertheless, being late is better than not doing anything at all, and thank you for mentioning this, because I believe everyone has the potential to do something meaningful and now since the beginning of the year 2023, so I started to do podcasts. So this is why I always, christian, am after people like yourself who can inspire not only entrepreneurs but anyone that things can go in a different direction. You don't have to accept your current situation. People talk about going out of your comfort zone. It's not like about comfort zone. It's about choosing another path that might put you in actually really a comfort zone, because now you're sitting in a place which is not comfortable and you accept it as your comfort zone. So this is why this is very important to take that Now, as we're close to an end, and I know you've done a lot of this previously, christian. 

But, I'm sure that you get a lot of questions from maybe younger entrepreneurs who want to start their journey, so from your experience in entrepreneurship, so what are some of the advices you would give them If they are just about to get started? I'd like to focus more on what we call them the first-time founders, because these are the guys who never started a business before. They have nothing they know about. So what you can tell them from your experience. 

0:37:00 - Christian
I think one thing at least with me like you mentioned, you got started a little bit later. I got started later too. I kind of ignored that innate feeling or pull that I wanted to become an entrepreneur. I got focused on a nine to five job and stability and the house and all that stuff, because I grew up in a very chaotic environment. I sought stability and safety for too long. So I think if somebody wants to be an entrepreneur or wants to start a business, I think it's important to actually understand what your drivers are, because it's not going to be an easy journey. 

A lot of people think if you become an entrepreneur, you're going to make all this money and you will make money if you succeed. But, as you mentioned earlier, most companies after a year don't succeed. After five years there's even less companies. So it's a game that the longer you're in it, the less likely you're going to be in it, because something's going to happen and it's trading like a nine to five, as people say. For a five to nine Because with me, with my first company, I worked all the time. 

I didn't have any free time. Partly I could control my hours to degree, but I had demands, I had payroll, I had sales, I had things I had to get done. So understand what you're getting into is the first thing, and then really dialing in what you're trying to sell and who you're trying to sell it to. I'm a proponent of the Storybrand framework by Donald Miller and I think it's a valuable exercise just for someone to go through the brand script we call it. So you understand what you're selling and how to position it to your target audience and you understand it from the perspective of the pain points you're solving for someone the emotional pain points as well as everything else. And if you don't have that dialed in, it's going to be a much harder struggle for your entrepreneur journey and for me, like when my first company, I just jumped into it and I didn't understand all these things. So I think it's important to really dial these things in before you take on a new endeavor, and that's what I did with this company. My new company is. 

I walked through that Storybrand framework for everything we sell to know what our messaging is, what the pain points are, who our specific target is, what they're thinking and how we can position ourselves as a guide in the story, not the hero. Another problem a lot of new founders and new entrepreneurs make is they want to position themselves as the hero in the story with a client. Really, the client is the hero and you're the guide. And you're the guide to take them across the chasm which is their problem. You're not the hero. It doesn't sell very well. We just constantly saying how great you are as a company versus how great your client is and how you can help them solve this problem. So I think those are a couple of the main things I would focus on. 

0:40:06 - Mehmet
That's great, and I always mentioned that you need to have a purpose. Of course, the money will follow, but if you put the money as your first target to become an entrepreneur. Sorry, you are on the wrong path. It doesn't work this way. Yeah, so you need to have a purpose, and if you have the purpose and if you do it, you give the customer what you promised. 

10 times and you put really your heart into the business, things will follow. And we can mention a lot of things, but we will not do that now. But, yeah, 100% on that question. So you know, christian, when we can find more about you and the books and offerings that you have and I know that you have a course also as well- my website, my personal brand website, Christian Espinosacom, has links to my cybersecurity company, which is BlueGoatcybercom. 

0:41:11 - Christian
My books are on Amazon. The latest book, the eBook, is available and the paperback is available. The audio should be released in a couple of weeks the audio version as well. 

0:41:23 - Mehmet
That's great. I will make sure that the links are in the show notes. Any final thing anything that you wished, I have asked you, Christian, before we close. 

0:41:36 - Christian
I don't know about anything specific. I think it's important anything you do in life, with your business, with entrepreneurship, your interactions to learn to be authentic and comfortable in your own skin. I think a lot of times we are afraid to be authentically who we are. I think the world needs more authenticity. There's too many people trying to be like somebody else and not bring their own authenticity to any interaction 100% and don't have an idol. 

0:42:12 - Mehmet
But don't aim to become that idol, because you will never become that idol. Just because you can take the best practices, you can be inspired, but you will never become someone else. This is something I keep repeating. I write about it. I mentioned it on the podcast. I say guys, don't be tricked by these people who write, hey, if you do these five things, you will become that. That doesn't happen, because if everyone do these five steps and become that, everyone will do it. It's not easy. I always get a bit philosophical now I say imagine always like we are in a space where you have the X and Y and the Z. Maybe when you do these things, you have the X and Y, but the Z is you. The Z is always something different. You are not the same characteristic of anybody else. This is why it doesn't work. This is why I tell people don't be tricked in that. 

0:43:12 - Christian
That's very good what you said there. I think there's a lot of people giving you the how-to steps. Like you said, everybody could do these five steps and become a billionaire or whatever. But I think to get more, we have to become more ourselves. That's a factor a lot of us forget. We have to do the work inside, because our outer world is a reflection of our inner world. 

0:43:35 - Mehmet
in my opinion, yeah, Sorry, because I took this slide from you. Christian just came to my mind. You have to be the main player, not someone else. You need to become the main person. Who's doing this? Otherwise, as I said, everyone can do this and become billionaire or whatever it is. 

0:44:03 - Christian
Great. 

0:44:04 - Mehmet
Well, christian, I really appreciate this conversation. I believe and this is something, by the way, for the audience you're going to start to see some previous guests appearing again on the podcast, because I received okay, let's do another episode. I'm hoping, christian, maybe sometime towards Q1 or Q2, maybe we'll have another episode with you, a part two maybe. 

0:44:26 - Christian
Yeah, for sure. 

0:44:27 - Mehmet
Because I believe you have a lot to share with us. Thank you for all what you've shared today. As I mentioned, all the links you mentioned will be in the show notes. This is for the audience. If you are first time here listening or watching us, thank you for passing by. I hope you become a loyal fan, like the other fans I have. Please subscribe, share this podcast with your friends, with your colleagues, and tell me what you think. And if you are one of the loyal fans, thank you very much for your support and your messages and for your also feedback. 

I like to read every single email message you drop to me. I read them all and I take them into consideration and I change some time things based on that. And if you are also interested to be a guest on the show, don't hesitate to reach out to me. If you have a story to tell, you have a concept that you believe everyone should know about it, Again, don't hesitate to reach out to me and we'll find a way to make it happen. Thank you very much for tuning in. We will meet again very soon. Thank you, Bye.